


We Were Made to Fight Loneliness

by miramei



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), Alternate Universe - Pacific Rim Fusion, An extended love letter to all the tech teams behind every Jaeger, Kenma's love language is buried in his code, Oikawa the man the myth the legend, Other tags as necessary, Pacific Rim-typical violence, Sakusa is soft for Komoris and Komoris only, gratuitous amounts of hand-holding
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-13
Updated: 2021-02-17
Packaged: 2021-03-14 00:13:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,771
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29410311
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/miramei/pseuds/miramei
Summary: After Raven Cyclone crumples, Tora leaves Kenma with only the small seed of a tech system, a wisp of an A.I. program that might have saved his life. Years later, when Hurricane Sickle limps home, her original interface completely destroyed, Kenma takes that tiny seedling that he’s been nurturing all alone to his battle programmers, and he decides to turn dreams into reality.(OR: Grief, love, and the desperate determination to create a miracle. These are these things that built the tech division of Tokyo Shatterdome.)
Relationships: Komori Motoya & Sakusa Kiyoomi, Komori Motoya & Sakusa Kiyoomi & Original Character, Kozume Kenma & Kuroo Tetsurou, Kozume Kenma & Yamamoto Taketora, Miya Atsumu & Miya Osamu
Kudos: 1





	1. Raven Cyclone

**Author's Note:**

> New year (happy year of the ox!), new me (?), new love of giant robots punching giant monsters as an extended metaphor of humanity rising up against all odds. And a continuation of me being a giant unapologetic Itachiyama simp.
> 
> Might be playing fast and loose with the technicalities of the Jaeger A.I.s but such is the life.

**I. RAVEN CYCLONE**

Arashi hits the shore on a muggy August day, carving a wide swath of ruin through the very heart of Kenma’s neighborhood. When it’s all over, Kenma remembers sitting in the back of a PPDC-stamped transport with a cracked PSP in his hands, speaking to no one as they get shuffled round and round the ruined city. He haunts first one hastily pitched up refugee camp, then another. He’s never sure what exactly happened to his mother, but by the third day he’s learned that his father had gone down with the hospital that he worked in. On the fifth day, something finally answers his unspoken pleas, because he finds Kuroo.

On the sixth day, they board yet another transport vehicle and trundle through a street that’s barely been scraped clean. The Pan Pacific Defense Corps recruitment center is barely on stabler ground than the refugee camps, but their banners flutter high in the wind, and the knobbly station is overrun with grim-faced uniforms rather than choked with the wide eyes of the desperately lost.

Kuroo hops off the truck. Kenma clamors down silently after him. A boy with a miserable hunch to his shoulders and a sagging mohawk caked in dust and grime stumbles into line just in front of them. When they all shuffle up to the front of the line, the recruiter on the left calls for the boy with the mohawk, and the one on the right calls for Kuroo.

Kenma waits, and then it’s finally his turn to go to the recruiter on the left.

The uniformed officer on the other side of a rickety plastic table gives Kenma an assessing look, and clearly doesn’t like what he sees. “You’re here for the Jaeger Academy recruitment?” he asks, oozing skepticism. “You want to be a pilot?”

He glances to his right—Kuroo is signing his name away on a crumpled form and nodding, face as grim as the soldier’s. They make eye contact before Kuroo shuffles away, another person sliding into the space between them, taking Kuroo’s place at the table. Kenma turns his gaze back to his own recruiter.

“No,” he says truthfully, the first thing that he’s said in six days. He just wants to go where Kuroo goes.

“Well, son, this isn’t really the place for you then.”

“I can—” Kenma says, too loud in his desperation, but he manages to cut in before the recruiter can wave him away. His voice cracks from disuse, but he finds that he doesn’t care enough to be embarrassed. “I can learn—I can learn to code. I can learn to strategize. Anything for support.” Kuroo has drifted further off, speaking to a couple other recruits. Kenma’s gaze follows him desperately.

“I just need to go where he goes,” he finishes defeatedly, shoulders slumping. The recruiter is silent for a long time.

“There might be a spot for you in J-tech,” the man finally says. Kenma scratches his name down in a daze, the characters crooked on the dotted line at the bottom of the form. When he stumbles away, it’s with a nondescript token badge folded tightly in his hand.

A derisive snort by his shoulder makes him look up. The boy with the mohawk is staring at him, eyes narrowed, mouth drawn down in a sharp frown. “Your motivation is weak,” he says plainly, as though Kenma had asked for his opinion. “You won’t last long at all.”

And with that, he spins on his heel and stomps away.

Three weeks into his new life as a cadet, this is what Kenma learns about the boy with the mohawk: his name is Yamamoto Taketora, he cannot beat Kuroo in a fight, and he had walked through the night to reach the recruitment station after watching his little sister die in the rubble of his home. Yamamoto Taketora dreams—loudly, boldly, and to anyone who gives him even half a glance—of getting into a Jaeger. 

At the eight-week mark, Kenma thinks that Yamamoto will burn himself out. He’s reckless and more iron-headed than the machines that he wants so desperately to sit in. Yamamoto Taketora, he thinks, will never be a pilot.

But he makes it through the first cut. He makes it through the second, and the third, and on and on and on. And at the end of it all, he makes it to Kenma, who stands at the end of the catwalk clutching a shiny new tablet, both of them dwarfed in the shadow of Raven Cyclone.

“Oh,” says Yamamoto. “What the heck, you’re still here?”

“I’m Kozume Kenma,” Kenma says very reluctantly, because now that he thinks about it, they’ve never formally exchanged greetings up until now, and unfortunately it looked like he could no longer put it off any longer. “I’m one of Raven Cyclone’s battle programmers.”

Yamamoto’s face twists, but this time he says nothing, and more importantly, he doesn’t go away.

Working on Raven Cyclone is its own level of hell.

Yamamoto and Tanaka don’t get along. They’re always one _“shitty city-boy”_ away from a full-on brawl, and they’re both legitimately upset when they end up being Drift-compatible. It only straightens out when they finally go for a test-run in the Raven and Shimizu oversees the neural handshake from LOCCENT, where it becomes love at first voice over for the both of them.

They work each other up in an infinitely positive feedback loop, and it’s Kenma’s job to maintain a massive program that will keep up with their never-ending drive. Kenma spends more and more time in front of the screen, either at his desk in the back of mission control or in the far corner of the computer lab, slumping further over his keyboard as the hours tick by. He’s rewarded when Raven Cyclone performs faster, hits harder, reliably knocks out kaiju and most importantly, keeps coming back. As days stretch into weeks bleed into months, Yamamoto’s molten criticism softens into cool disdain, and then again into some form of thoughtfully begrudging understanding.

“Kuroo-san was right. You _do_ spend a lot of time here,” he says, late one evening in the abandoned computer lab. Kenma startles so badly that he nearly knocks over the dregs of his coffee. Yamamoto is draped over the chair at his side, staring blankly at Kenma’s screen, face lit up eerily in blue. “I think you spend more time here than the main programmer for Raven.”

“I didn’t want to leave this unfinished,” Kenma finds himself confessing after a few beats of awkward silence. “The auto-adjustment on your cannons. I can make it just a few seconds faster.”

Yamamoto swings his gaze from the screen to Kenma’s face. Kenma focuses very hard on his script, closing his current line of code. “That’s a lot of hours for just a second or two,” he says slowly.

“Is that wrong?” Kenma bites back, shoulders inching towards his ears.

“Nah,” Yamamoto says, “Just thought that I’m glad you’re on my Jaeger and not someone else’s.”

What.

 _What_.

Kenma’s head swivels towards him, startled. Yamamoto has the gall to look _annoyed_ at how surprised Kenma is. “What?” he barks defensively, his affront bouncing off the walls of the empty lab. “Not that the other programmers don’t care about their jaegers, but you don’t see any of _them_ consistently working late nights just to shave a single second off a cannon’s load-time, or just to streamline the data display so that it’s an easier read when you’re being thrown around! I also know you did that auto-link project, too—the one with K-Sci—where the system queues up attack programs that were effective when hitting similar threats in the past and enables it to execute faster!”

“How do you,” Kenma croaks, “How do you _know_ all that?”

Yamamoto looks absolutely flabbergasted. “I’m one of Raven Cyclone’s _pilots!_ ” he hisses, and then his gaze softens. “Most of your programs are for the left-hemisphere, aren’t they? I can tell. They have a certain feel to them when they boot up.”

“They’re just lines of code,” Kenma protests, but Yamamoto’s expression is impossibly fond. He feels exposed, and resaves his progress with shaky fingers just for want of something to do.

“You should call me Tora,” Yamamoto says. “It’s the least I can do. I’ve been meaning to offer this to you earlier, actually, but you’re real hard to pin down.”

Too many things are happening all at once. Kenma feels overwhelmed, but Yamamoto— _Tora_ —is apparently far from done. “S’nice to know that it’s not just me and Tanaka in there when we go out to fight monsters, y’know? I mean, _obviously_ I trust my life with all the programs in Raven Cyclone, but yours are something special.” Kenma has to bodily remind himself to actually breathe, especially when Tora gives him a boyishly lopsided smile. “They feel like they were made just for me. So. Thanks for that. Thanks for caring.”

That’s _despicable_ , Kenma thinks helplessly as something in his chest seizes. That was _unfair_. Yamamoto Taketora must have been put on this earth specifically to antagonize him.

But he still accepts the can of black coffee that Tora gives him before he leaves. He still stays late in the lab finishing up the auto-adjustment program. Up until the bitter end, he still pours all his care and attention into the programs on Raven Cyclone’s left hemisphere.

December comes, and Primirus leaps from the sea, crippling the Grand King at the other end of the country. The waves take Iwaizumi away in a violent, cold surge. Oikawa is left to fight off the kaiju on his own, and nearly drowns with his Jaeger in the process. He keeps his life in exchange for his leg and his career as a ranger. It’s a miracle that there’s still enough of Grand King left to make it worth salvaging.

“Man, Oikawa sure is something else,” Tora says as he walks Kenma back to the computer lab after the Tokyo staff have been given the debrief from their sister Shatterdome in Nagasaki. Kenma hums noncommittally. Tora is trying to adopt Kuroo’s effortless slouch, but his movements are far too jerky for it to look anywhere close to natural.

He catches Kenma’s shoulder before he can dart into the safety of the lab. “Hey,” he starts. Falters. Tries again, because Tora is nothing if not earnest. “If it were you, do you think you could’ve done anything different?”

 _I’m not a pilot,_ Kenma wants to say petulantly. Yet he swallows it down. Grand King was top of the line, well-balanced and powerful, equipped with some of the most sophisticated navigation instruments and boasting the smoothest gear changes out of all the machines Japan had. Its programs would have been complex and elegant; an end goal to aspire towards for any programmer. 

But if Kenma was the one wrangling the code, there might be one additional aspect that he’d have liked to try for.

“There might be merit in a neural overreach program, if the A.I. can support it. To lessen the burden of solo-ing,” he says slowly. Even as a haphazardly strung string of words, it sounds enticing if not impossibly ambitious. But not everyone was Oikawa, who seemed to be able to do the impossible through hard work and sheer force of will alone. The Academy might be full of wide-eyed and hopeful cadets, but experienced pilots were few and far between. In Kenma’s humble opinion, it was always worth it to keep them.

But Kenma is also a realist. “I don’t think anyone would want to invest in developing a near-impossible program that’ll only trigger in such a critical condition though,” he says softly, worrying at the hem of his shirt. “Better to improve on what you already have, I think.” 

Tora just looks at him for a long while. Kenma doesn’t squirm, but just barely. At last, he says: “I guess that makes sense.”

“I’m sorry,” Kenma says, not entirely sure what exactly he’s apologizing for but feeling the compulsive need to do so anyway. Tora grins, and punches him lightly in the shoulder. It still manages to hurt.

“Nah, don’t be. We can’t all be Oikawa, I guess.” There’s something a little far away in his eyes despite his easy grin.

“I think Raven Cyclone is just as good as Grand King,” Kenma says, and is only mildly surprised to find that he means it. The words are familiar in his mouth, like they were a truth that was building and building and building and just waiting for the first opportunity to spill out. “We’re in it together.” 

This time, when Tora smiles, it’s something genuine. “Yeah,” he says. “I got Tanaka and you, and Yaku-san, and all the other mechanics and programmers with our massive hunk of steel. Guess a man doesn’t need much else.”

One of the last things that Tora ever says to Kenma is this: “Look, I know it’s cheesy and you’ll hate it but from the moment I learned that you chose to wake up at 3 am just to work on my programs I realized I was the luckiest man in the world.”

Tora is right. Kenma _does_ hate it. He has the unfortunate luck of being right next to Kuroo when Tora rushes him with this proclamation, and Kuroo immediately bends over double and _wheezes_. Kenma can still hear him struggling to breathe even as he staggers away to give them privacy. It’s humiliating.

To make things a hundred times worse, Tora means every single word. There’s a stubborn set to his mouth and his gaze is clear and strong. He barrels on: “You pissed me off at first because I thought you didn’t care about anything. I thought you never tried, because everyone else always seemed to be scrambling during the day, and you’d just do the same thing you always did. But you do try. You try _so hard_ , Kenma, even though you hate when other people notice it, even when you have to stay late, even when it’s a project that no one’s ever even mentioned yet.” 

He folds Kenma’s hands into his much-larger ones. Kenma has never wished more for the Shatterdome wall to just swallow him whole.

“You finish anything that you set out to do,” Tora says, tone gentle but voice steely in his conviction. “ _Anything_. And one day you’re going to move onto bigger things than Raven, and I’m going to miss you when you do, because you make me feel _safe_.”

“It’s my job,” Kenma finally manages to force out, sagging against the wall. “And,” he adds hesitantly, tasting the words on his tongue even as he knows them to be true, “And you’re my friend.”

Tora lights up. Before this, only one other boy had ever had that same reaction to Kenma saying those same words, and so he drinks in the expression, wriggling his fingers until Tora releases his hands just enough so that Kenma can grab them back. Saying them again is so, so easy.

Uchimata is a cruel reminder that Kenma only has so much power.

It rises out of the sea with a sick sort of grace that quickly transforms into lethal brutality, smashing into the side of Raven Cyclone’s Conn-Pod, where it misses the vitals by nothing but a prayer. Tora and Tanaka struggle on, even as Bokuto and Kuroo, sitting on perimeter duty in Tactic Supernova, come rushing over to assist. Tora’s relief is palpable, though it quickly shifts to abject terror.

The feeds in LOCCENT dedicated to monitoring Raven shake from the assault. Kenma clutches the edge of his desk and watches as his programs fail one after another after another. Raven Cyclone was built to feed off the combined energies of two hot-headed pilots. Now, there was only one.

Not everyone can be Oikawa Tooru, but in that instance, Kenma thinks that Tora got as close as humanly possible. Tactic Supernova is less than 200 meters away, and still Tora fights on, alone and flagging. A hundred meters, and Uchimata finally succeeds in unbalancing Raven Cyclone. 

Fifty, and Raven Cyclone crumples in its entirety. Twenty-five, and there’s no longer a need for Tactic Supernova to be careful. Ten, and a point-blank shot from Supernova’s FKR V2 Plasmacannon finally scores a clean hit straight through Uchimata.

Tora had once asked him if there was anything else he thought he could do. Uchimata had crashed into the scene and told him that there was nothing, but in Kenma’s dreams, Tora is still holding his hands and telling him that he made him feel safe, that he was meant for bigger things. But Tora is gone, and all he’d left behind was this tiny seed of a near-impossible program, and Kenma was a realist.

When he wakes, it’s to the crippling sense of grief that there is no longer a left hemisphere for him to return to. He will never return to that certain level of hell that was working on Raven Cyclone. He buries the seed deep, where it would be difficult for it to get sunlight, if at all, because it was dangerous to grow false hope.

His fingers shake in his pockets when he goes to the funeral. He does not cry.


	2. Hurricane Sickle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kiyoomi counts out forty-nine long seconds. By the time he’s done, Yuna’s hand in his is no longer cool to the touch. Normally, he’d shake it off by now, but he’s still feeling rattled. It’s irrational, but it feels like if he lets go, he’ll lose any connection he had with his cousin to the scant three feet of distance between the beds.
> 
> “I almost lost Motoya,” he whispers. He needs to etch the truth into his very fiber, so that he can analyze what he’s doing wrong and never repeat it again. He and Motoya went into this together, and no matter how short a stint it was, he had forced Motoya to pilot on his own.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Self-indulging with my go-to volleyball OC and lots of familial affection because I am a simple bean.
> 
> So I actually don't know how easy it is to knock out when you're piloting a massive robot but the sheer force of all that jerking around probably ups the risk by a lot, even when you're all strapped in (as properly as you can get) and underwent all that training. I watched a little behind-the-scenes clip about the effects showing how they built the Conn-Pod rig and it's basically like a huge horrible amusement park ride haha. The machinery is cool though.

**II. HURRICANE SICKLE**

Hurricane Sickle limps back to port from the miracle mile, battered and bruised, dragging a leg through the murky waters of Tokyo Bay and stubbornly clinging to a sparking arm. The first and foremost important thing, though, is that Sawtooth, the massive Category 4 she’d been brutally grappling with, is dead in the water. The second important thing is that she’s upright and hobbling along on her own power. Hurricane Sickle had left just over two hours ago as a green and yellow beacon cutting through the first rays of a rising sun. Now, she’s covered in Kaiju Blue and looks sickly. 

A Jumphawk team meets her en route, and that’s when the arm finally gives up, the last stubborn cord snapping. The intercom crackles to life in the same instance that Hurricane’s right arm crashes into the water. Komori Motoya’s voice wheezes into LOCCENT, something strained and near-incomprehensible save for his co-pilot’s name, followed by one very clear, “ _ Aw, shit.”  _ Hurricane comes to a groaning halt at the same instance her primary feed cuts off entirely. The Jumphawks descend, in a move that’s eerily similar to vultures.

It takes another hour for the extraction team to get the Jaeger safely into the Shatterdome and her pilots evacuated. Sakusa and Komori are dead weight in the medical team’s hands, but both of them are still breathing—however shallowly—with twin pulses jack-rabbiting underneath the armor of their drivesuits. Sakusa’s suit is cracked at the shoulder and there’s blood smearing all the way down his arm. The same bright red is free-flowing from Komori’s nose, spilling down his chin to mix with all the sweat and condensation that comes with moving and fighting behemoths. They’re swept away in a whirlwind of organized chaos. One tiny blonde nurse runs with the gurneys, both arms up and occupied with drips. A small team of technicians stampedes after them, where they’ll help the surgeons in the operating room peel off the drivesuits.

Komori Yuna itches to be down there, running with the tiny army towards the infirmary. If this had been another life, maybe she would have. She’d probably have been largely useless asides from calling their mother and aunt, but she’d have been  _ there _ , for whatever it would have been worth. If this had been another life, her brother and cousin returning bloody and unconscious would have been a one-in-a-million occurrence. But this is not that life.

In  _ this  _ life, Kiyoomi and Motoya frequently turn up battered and bruised. They bleed easily, even without having been deployed. Usually, they stagger out of the Conn-Pod under their own strength, but she’s seen Kiyoomi haul Motoya out over his shoulder before and she’s also seen the both of them get to the bottom step in the hangar only for Kiyoomi to then pass out cold, knocking Motoya over like an over-balanced domino. Occupational hazard, she thinks dully, has an entirely different meaning when spoken of in the context of being a Jaeger pilot.

_Aw, shit_ , she thinks, fingers shaking as she reaches for the tiny plastic stoat figurine that she kept near her coffee mug. The cheap paint job is dull and faded from how often she’s turned the little thing in her hands. She’s pretty sure her brother had been piloting Hurricane alone for the better part of the final crawl to port.

LOCCENT Mission Controller Kozume Kenma gives her a single long glance as she worries the toy. His gaze skitters to his own massive monitor when she chances a glance upwards and accidentally catches his eye. “You could go now, if you want,” he says softly, like he tends to to say most things. “Akaashi can take over your station in the interim.”

“I’d—” Yuna starts, intensely focused on the way her thumb runs over the toy stoat’s back, where there are scores in the plastic to mimic fur. “I’d rather not, sir.” There was a danger to being idle, and there was nowhere more dangerous to be idle in than in the uncomfortable plastic chairs in the operating wing. “I’ll just stay for Hurricane Sickle’s initial damage report. They’ll want to know what to expect when they wake up,” she tacks on to soften her first statement.

Kenma hums lowly but says nothing more. Across from her, Akaashi’s pity is carefully veiled by a clinically neutral expression. At the end of their table, Semi does one better and doesn’t even look her way. Good.

Yaku’s voice filters into LOCCENT with a low whistle. “Damn,” the engineer says, sounding begrudgingly impressed, “Sawtooth really saw Hurricane Sickle come out to meet it and thought we sent it a chew toy. Look at these marks on her shoulder.”

Yuna did not want to look at the marks on Hurricane’s shoulder, the shoulder that she knew was connected to Kiyoomi’s. She still turns along with half of mission control to look at the hangar feed anyway. The teeth marks are scored deep into Hurricane Sickle’s plating, exposing the circuitry and supports. Metal curls away from the jagged scrapes. Several pieces are heavily warped and bent out of shape from Kaiju Blue. Sawtooth had clearly used its razor-sharp teeth and acidic saliva to great effect.

“The cannon on that lost arm better still be intact when they fish it out of the sea. I’d rather not repeat what we did with Tactic Supernova,” comes Suna’s voice. He doesn’t sound very optimistic, but it’s hard to tell if he truly felt that way or if he was just remarking in his usual detached manner with just his voice.

Yaku  _ laughs _ , because of course he would laugh after having swore up a storm for the past week while fighting with Supernova’s new plasma cannon. “Better keep your fingers crossed then!” he says cheerfully. Sobering, he says: “But I’m with Suna. Hurricane’s right arm is her main battery. It will hurt if we have to rebuild it from the ground up. Discounting that, the entirety of her right side took a hammering. The left’s doing better though it’s not a pretty sight either. You got lucky with the Conn-Pod, but I’ll get a tech in there to get an extensive look at the damages and then we’ll hook her up and see if we can reboot her A.I. She’s not too far gone that we can’t save her, though,” Yaku adds, which is unfairly reassuring. 

There’s a ghost of a smile on Kenma’s face as Yaku’s voice goes a little dreamy as he starts yammering about his favorite features on the machine, seemingly forgetting that he’s still connected to LOCCENT. Yaku would probably happily write an entire series of theses on Hurricane Sickle’s ITACH stabilizing system, from the huge system of dampers and balance plates on her feet to the shock re-distributors climbing up her legs. They made her one of the steadiest machines that Tokyo had at its disposal, built to roll with the punches that came her way until it came time to launch a counterattack.

“Oh, fuck,” suddenly slices through his tirade. There’s the unmistakable slap of his boots against the metallic catwalk as he starts running, and then he’s yelling, the words unintelligible through the staticy feedback. On the screens overlooking Bay 3, LOCCENT is left to watch helplessly as techs dive out of the way, just in time to avoid the popping explosions that take out the entire face of the Conn-Pod. Kenma, having leapt out of his seat in a rare show of urgency, stares wide-eyed as the smoke slowly clears and the crew inches cautiously forward.

“What happened?” he asks, fist white-knuckled against the mic, as though they didn’t just watch it all happen. There’s some furious hissing on the other side of the line, and then Yaku comes back.

“So we tried to reboot the A.I.,” he says crisply, “and it appears that the generator overwhelmed the interface.” Kenma puts his head in his hands, massaging at his temples as he slowly sinks back into his chair. “I’m sorry,” Yaku says, and he sounds so genuinely apologetic that it makes everything  _ worse _ , “but it’s probably all gone.”

“Wonderful,” Kenma sighs, sounding eons old. “Fucking fantastic.”

Kiyoomi swims back into consciousness already acutely aware of the scratch of Shatterdome standard-issue sheets against his back. It’s how he knows he’s in the sickbay, because the first thing he’d done with his paycheck had been to buy a set of  _ better _ sheets for his own bed. He can hear some soft murmuring, deliberately pitched low so that he can’t make out the individual words themselves. In his nose is a slow curl of coffee—the good kind—warm and comforting.

There's a throb pulsing against his temple, insistent enough to be annoying but not too debilitating in that way that told him it was more Motoya’s migraine than his own. His shoulder and most of his upper arm, though—it stung something fierce and was all his. Although their lives depended on both of them mastering defensive capabilities, that was generally more Motoya’s forte than Kiyoomi’s. They usually tried to swing Hurricane Sickle in a way that gave Motoya first contact when they were deployed. This time however, Sawtooth had burst out of the water on the right-hand side, forcing Kiyoomi to act first. It had hurt like a bitch.

He groans and crankily forces his eyes to blink open. When he finally gets his vision to focus, it’s to find Iizuna standing at the foot of his bed, with Yuna sitting at his bedside, each of them nursing a steaming cup. They both look terrible, which is probably an unkind thing to note about them given the circumstances.

“Iizuna-san,” he croaks out at the same time that he moves his good arm towards Yuna’s hand. Kiyoomi tolerates touches from few people and initiates them with even fewer, although his two remaining cousins were at the top of both lists. Yuna abandons her mug in favor of lacing her fingers through his with no hesitation.

“Sakusa,” Iizuna breathes out, his name leaden with relief. He tries for levity even as his knuckles tighten over the frail handle of his own mug. “From the furrow on your brow, I can already tell you hate the bed.”

Kiyoomi wets his lips, and is pleased when his second attempt to speak sounds more human than the first. “It’s uncomfortable,” he says, which is part of the truth. Iizuna looks at him as though he might look straight through him, but thankfully does not dig further.

“Motoya?” Kiyoomi asks. He remembers getting Hurricane Sickle to parry a brutal swing from Sawtooth, only for it to glance off of the Conn-Pod at her head with a thunderous  _ boom _ . He thinks— _ fuck _ —he  _ thinks _ he actually blacked out for a hot minute or two when her arm first tore, when Sawtooth had grabbed the appendage and jerked their entire Jaeger like a rag doll to tear a jagged ruin through the metal from shoulder clear to elbow, because when he had blinked the stars out of his eyes and could actually read something on the flashing interface again Motoya had already been bleeding into his helmet. They’d both doggedly hung on for the rest of the fight, Kiyoomi absolutely abusing their Jaeger’s arm since there wasn’t any point in hesitating when it got down to the wire like that.

He’d  _ definitely _ passed out on the pained retreat afterwards, he knows that much at least. Motoya will never let him live it down when they get out of the infirmary. He just—he just needs to  _ know _ that Motoya will never let him live it down.

“‘M‘ere,” comes a sleepy slur from somewhere behind Yuna at the same instance that she squeezes Kiyoomi’s fingers and repositions herself. Motoya is lying on the bed directly opposite his, hair an absolute disaster, face a shade too pale, blue eyes bloodshot and dazed but getting progressively clearer with each sleepy blink. He quirks a crooked smile across the scant few feet of distance between them when he catches Kiyoomi looking at him. Relief floods hot and heavy through Kiyoomi’s chest, and he returns Yuna’s squeeze with one of his own.

“You’re—” Motoya starts, face pinching as he struggles to move, looking absolutely exhausted. “Are you doin’ the thing?” He manages to free one hand and flutters it in Yuna’s direction. “Do it wi’me, too.”

“Course,” Yuna says easily, grabbing his hand in her unoccupied one and guiding it back down to the bed in a practiced motion. “Do you need Iizuna-san to hold your other hand while you go back to sleep?” she teases, despite the unhappy little furrow in her brow. Motoya mumbles something unintelligible and makes a token effort to pop his other hand out before giving up. Iizuna looks on with an expression of dry amusement.

“I’ll work you into the mats when you get back into the Combat Room, Komori—don’t think I didn’t see that,” he warns. But his tone is far too fond for how stern his words are, and he even leans over to ruffle Motoya’s messy hair. Despite already being half-asleep, Motoya still manages to preen under the attention.

“Gross,” Kiyoomi says without heat.

“Don’t worry, Sakusa,” Iizuna says cheerily. “There’s plenty more love where that comes from.” He moves to the door. “I’ll speak to the med staff, but unless otherwise specified, you’re both on medical leave for the next two weeks. Then give it another week or so before you can even  _ think _ about testing out the new battle programs in the simulator. You were cutting it far too close with Sawtooth.” 

Motoya is dead to the world again, so Kiyoomi is left to give a sullen reply on both their behalf. It rankles, but it’s the truth. Faced with that and Iizuna’s pinched face, Kiyoomi has nothing else to offer. It’s more of a relief than Kiyoomi is comfortable admitting when the other man’s face softens into a smile—Iizuna’s disappointment had always been just on the wrong side of too heavy to bear.

“As long as you’re aware,” he says softly. He looks like he wants to say more, but decides against it, Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallows. Instead, he gives one last nod before excusing himself, mindful of the door on his way out. 

Kiyoomi counts out forty-nine long seconds. By the time he’s done, Yuna’s hand in his is no longer cool to the touch. Normally, he’d shake it off by now, but he’s still feeling rattled. Yuna has the good grace not to look at him, intent on the rise and fall of Motoya’s chest in the other bed, even as Kiyoomi’s entire hand twitches and he holds on with bruising strength. It’s irrational, but it feels like if he lets go, he’ll lose any connection he had with his cousin to the scant three feet of distance between the beds.

“I almost lost Motoya,” he whispers. He needs to etch the truth into his very fiber, so that he can analyze what he’s doing wrong and never repeat it again. He and Motoya went into this together, and no matter how short a stint it was, he had forced Motoya to pilot on his own.

Yuna’s turned to him now, and is looking at him like how she’d assess one of her battle programs. It’s cat-like and sharp, though not immediately intimidating—probably something that she picked up from their mission controller. Kiyoomi decides that he dislikes it. The clock ticks loudly by.

“Go to sleep, Kiyo-nii,” she says at last, voice gentle, blithely ignoring the fact that Kiyoomi is the youngest out of the three of them. “Both of you came back. There’ll be plenty of time to listen to Toya-nii’s complaining tomorrow.” The corner of her mouth lifts in mild amusement as Kiyoomi’s face scrunches on reflex, but he says nothing, opting instead to turn his face stubbornly towards the ceiling.

He doesn’t let go.

The first time Kiyoomi had grabbed his cousins’ hands with no intention of letting go, he was nine, and they were at a summer festival. He was tired, and he’d been ready to go home twenty minutes ago. Except Motoya and Yuna had both been looking at one of the game booths with a particular brand of abject  _ longing _ , and the argument and general prickliness that Kiyoomi had been gearing up for had rapidly lost steam. Like a sand castle before a tidal wave, all his defenses had crumbled. They were  _ nine _ —it was absolutely unfair how much power the Komori siblings had over him. 

“Let’s play it then,” he’d grumbled, grabbing both of their hands with one of his own. He tugged them forward with purpose. “We’ll play it, and we’ll win, and then we’ll go home.”

The matching grins they gave him should have filled him with indignation, because that was how they had gotten him out to this festival in the first place. That was how they had conned him out of his takoyaki. That was how they had worn him down after begging him to try on the masks with them. But it’s hard to be upset with them when they smile at him like he’s offering them the world, when in reality all he was doing was begrudgingly hauling them over to the string lottery.

Small hands pulled out the last of their spare change. Motoya held up an extra coin in his hand—Kiyoomi’s share—and something warm had settled in Kiyoomi’s chest, right next to his heart. They’d won two pieces of candy and a tiny plastic figurine of a weasel that’s clutching an equally tiny plastic knife. The kids next to their group said:  _ “Aw, tough luck! The foxes are better.” _

They don’t know what they’re talking about, Kiyoomi remembers thinking. Kamaitachi were sometimes said to come in sets of three, after all. That was good enough for Kiyoomi.

He didn’t say that, though. Instead he’d said: “I like it,” and pocketed the little toy monster carefully away, leaving the candy to his cousins. Their hands were small and warm and sticky in his, but Kiyoomi was feeling generous, and so he’d held their hands all the way home.

The second time Kiyoomi had grabbed his cousins’ hands with no intention of letting go, he was fourteen, and there was a sprawling glittering wreckage of rebar and warped metal and broken glass spread out before them. It was a beautiful day out, and they had stumbled for what seemed like hours through the maze of destruction in their city only to learn that they couldn’t even gain access to their street to complete the final leg of their journey. 

Motoya had been quiet next to him. He hadn’t made a sound since that terrible sobbing noise he’d let out when Yuna had tumbled out from behind a particularly large chunk of concrete, dusty and dazed and with a bright red streak down her arm but  _ alive _ . He hadn’t said anything since rumbling had cut off his chatter about their summer break plans, and Kiyoomi had yanked him down to the ground, curling his own body over Motoya’s and hoping against hope that the roar of the world would mask the pounding of his heart.

Motoya was quiet, but he’d still squeezed Kiyoomi’s hand intermittently. Kiyoomi would then squeeze Yuna’s with his other hand, and she’d squeeze back. They had passed this tiny scrap of reassurance back and forth between them through the entirety of their walk. By the time they had made it to this final roadblock, his cousins’ hands were hot and clammy and grimy in his. It felt disgusting.

Kiyoomi had gripped down harder anyways, and he’d turned them away from the ruins of a life they once had.

They had stayed at their grandparents’ for a while, in a cruel twist of their original summer plans. Summer had bled into fall and froze into winter, and though none of their older siblings ever showed up, eventually Kiyoomi’s older brother had called the house, voice tinny and 1,230 kilometers away. Kiyoomi scraped together a new routine out of the few remaining scraps of normality he had, and only broke it shortly after his fifteenth birthday.

Motoya and Yuna had trailed after him when he led them to the PPDC recruitment office. It’s an actual building here, reclaimed from the local middle school’s gymnasium. Huge posters were plastered to the walls: Grand King, en route to the miracle mile; Aquila Empyreal, headlights cutting through choppy waves; the head and shoulders of Little Giant with their most famous pilots to date, Udai and Tsukishima, perched next to the Conn-Pod. Each had the PPDC emblem and VICTORY, NOW IS THE TIME TO JOIN boldly stamped upon the glossy surface.

Kiyoomi had done all of his hesitation on the worn tatami of his grandparents’ house, so now he marched forward without faltering. He did not possess a death wish, and he had no overwhelmingly strong desire to be a hero. But he had wanted to survive, and he had wanted to do everything that he could possibly do to that end. 

Motoya, naturally, had been furious.

_ “You’re the youngest!” _ he had yelled when Kiyoomi had first told him of his plans to be a pilot. Nothing was ever muffled by the paper doors at their grandparents’ old house, but he had shouted loudly enough that even their neighbors could have heard them. The worn wood crashing into Kiyoomi’s back as Motoya had slammed him into it had hurt too, and it left Kiyoomi with a bruise that lasted for days. He bore it quietly.

_ “If you think I’m letting you go then you have another thing coming,” _ Motoya had hissed when the worst of the anger had sloughed off, fingers wound tightly into Kiyoomi’s shirt and stretching it horribly.

_ “I’m going,” _ Kiyoomi replied evenly, folding his hands over Motoya’s, keenly aware of Yuna watching wide-eyed from the corner.  _ “I’m going to be a pilot.” _

“We’re here to enlist in the Jaeger corps,” Motoya says to the recruiter now. He was still angry, but he was here. Motoya was always there. Enlisting ended up being so easy.

Yuna steps up to the recruitment desk after them. The officer takes one look at the words on the bright red medical ID tagged around her wrist and frowns. “Are you also here to be a pilot?” he asks anyways. 

“No,” she says, her voice small but steady. “But I can do math. I can learn to program. I can learn to do anything for technical support.”

Kiyoomi and Motoya bore holes into the side of her head from the force of their glares, but too bad, she thinks bitterly. Yuna was angry, too, but she was also here. She’d been here since the three of them were seven and virtually strangers. She wasn’t going to go running back home, now, alone. 

“I need to go where you go,” she said, eyes blazing in challenge, and watched as the fight drained out of both boys.

She signs her name away, and gambles everything on a J-tech token badge.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hurricane Sickle is a blatant play on the idea of the kamaitachi because I... love them...
> 
> Some stories say they're a trio of gods. The first one knocks you down. The second one cuts you with its sickle. The third one puts on medicine so that the wound doesn't hurt.

**Author's Note:**

> You know how every once in a while something comes along and slaps you in the face demanding that you think about it? That's how I feel about giant robots and KenTora.


End file.
